51. Conan pan Czarnej Rzeki (Conan, Lord of the Black River) 1996
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Alastair J Archibald Grimm Dragonblaster 03 Questor (v5.0)
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James Axler Outlander 10 Outer Darkness
Herbert, Frank The Dragon in the Sea (Under Pressure)
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Farmer, Philip Jose Lord Tyger
Naomi Novik Temeraire 1 His Majesty's Dragon
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with which to damage it. So he had to bring in a fighting force, preferably
with some of those small bombs he had used on the fliers. With surprise on
their side, reasonable luck, very fast action, and his guidance as to the
vital spots of the stronghold, he guessed that a hundred or so good fighting
men could clean the place out.
That would chop off the Ice Master's threat at the roots; without the support
from the stronghold the
Dragon lair would wither on the vine.
Obviously this would not take care of the Menel entirely, but certainly it
would create enough of an uproar that they would notice something was going
on. Some of them would undoubtedly come up that shaft from their nearest
settlement to find out what. From the Ice Master's vague descriptions they
apparently were not so physically formidable that it was impossible to kill or
capture them preferably capture. And then? It was going to be difficult to
communicate with them without the Ice Master, but on the other hand it was
going to be next to impossible to destroy all their settlements, even if that
were the right thing to do. Certainly the immediate threat to the Treduki
would be gone when the Ice Master was defeated; possibly after that some way
could be found for human and Menel to share this world.
Meanwhile, how to bring in the fighting force to deal with the Ice Master?
Granted, the man was so eager for an ally against the Menel that he was giving
Blade an amount of help and freedom that would have been preposterous under
other circumstances. But he was still holding Leyndt somewhere in the
stronghold, and would certainly kill or torture her if Blade simply went up to
the surface and dashed off in one of the fliers. Scratch that idea. And Blade
could hardly imagine the Ice Master letting him take one of the fliers and
head south. That would be the act of a fool, and the Ice Master, mad,
egotistical, and cruel though he was, showed no signs of being that kind of
fool.
Very well. The Ice Master would not let Blade go unless the situation was
desperate. So how to create a desperate situation for the Ice Master? His
strength and his prospects depended on the good will of the Menel. The thing
he would most fear would be losing the support of the Menel, and having them
turn against him would be several times worse.
So how to turn the Menel against the Ice Master? Many of the guards definitely
received additional conditioning at the hands of the Menel themselves. The
Menel were not such fools as to put so much of their knowledge and power into
the hands of a human without taking some care to watch, control, and limit
him. (One way in which they had limited him was prohibiting him from cloning
human guards in the same way he cloned the Ice Dragons. Such guards would have
been entirely under the Ice Master's control and entirely immune from that of
the Menel. Obviously this was intolerable and just as obviously the
prohibition was one of the Ice Master's main grievances against the Menel.)
But all the guards would not be so conditioned. Suppose some of them turned
against the Menel or seemed to be turning against the Menel, which would be
just as effective? The Menel would unleash their conditioned guards against
the other ones, and the Ice Master's forces would be divided. The stronghold
would be a shambles of fighting men, clambering up and down its scores of
levels and slaughtering one another. The Ice Master would be tearing his beard
out by the bloody roots!
And then, if Blade came to him in the middle of the shambles and promised that
if allowed to fly to the south he would bring back a hundred or more fighting
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men, loyal to him, that could be thrown into the battle against the Menel's
guards? At that point Blade would become not merely a useful ally but an
indispensable one for survival, and he could head south with reasonable
certainty that Leyndt would be safe. Unless she was killed in the fighting, of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
